He was known as "Vasco" to his friends and family due to his Basque descent from his mother, María Elisa Aristizabal Iparraguirre Lazaga y Gogorza.
[1] The advent of the National Reorganization Process, the last Argentine dictatorship, on March 24, 1976, led to Diz's appointment as President of the Central Bank of Argentina on April 2.
[4][8] Part of an anti-inflation package unveiled in late 1978 (prices had risen 175% annually for two years), Diz implemented Martínez de Hoz's Exchange Timetable (the Tablita).
The pre-announced, progressively smaller devaluations of the peso encouraged the financial sector, and the economy benefited from both a recovering credit market, as well as from lower inflation (which slowed to half the 1978 rate).
The disproportionately slow crawling peg approach helped make the peso one of the world's most overvalued currencies by 1980, however, and the collapse of the BIR, a heavily leveraged newer bank, on March 28, touched off a wave of capital flight as fears of an imminent crisis mounted.
[2] The timetable, made unsustainable by the balance of payments crisis, was abandoned in February 1981,[4] however, and both the Economy Minister and his protégé, Adolfo Diz, stepped down at the end of March; even as those privy to inside information from the Central Bank profited with the collapse of the peso, a large number of homeowners and other borrowers were bankrupted by the sharply higher monthly payments imposed by Circular 1050.